Romance that gets under your skin
Don’t Let The Forest In Review
I’m pretty open to reading any genre but romance will always have my heart. And, what is more romantic than wanting to crack your crush’s ribs wide open and crawl inside them to curl up next to their heart? When I found CG Drews and their aesthetic on Instagram, I was so intrigued to read a book that could grow from this aesthetic. Fortunately, the UK paperback edition of Don’t Let The Forest In had very recently been released and I dropped all my current reads to bury myself in this one.
Drews’s novel is for a very specific kind of romantic. If cutting your crush’s heart out of their chest to sew it to yours doesn’t sound like a cute date idea, then Don’t Let The Forest In might not be for you. However, if you are someone who has ever dreamed of running away and living as one with nature in all its terrifying beauty then I’d recommend grabbing yourself a copy before reading the rest of this review.
From the first sentence of Don’t Let The Forest In, I felt like this book was going to tear my heart from my chest and bury it so deep in the ground that I would spend the rest of time wandering numbly in search of it. Sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? But, that’s exactly the kind of review the visceral imagery folded into the pages of Don’t Let The Forest In deserves. Whether it’s love, trauma or traumatic love, the monsters that lurk in the forest outside (and force their way inside) Wickwood Academy are horrifyingly familiar.
The plot of Don’t Let The Forest In centres mostly around the growing relationship between Andrew and his best friend, the boy Andrew is utterly obsessed with, Thomas. Andrew returns for another year at the prestigious Wickwood Academy but with his twin sister, Dove, giving him an unexplained cold shoulder, Andrew leans even more on his friend. However, Thomas has his own mystery to unravel when he also returns to Wickwood on the tail of his parents’ disappearance and with blood on his sleeve.
That plot alone is enough to intrigue any dark academia fan but that isn’t what made me pick up a copy. Alongside this arguably more grounded drama are the nightmarish monsters that crawl out of the off-limits forest outside Wickwood every night. Monsters that the boys must destroy to protect the rest of the school and atone for potentially being their unintentional creators. However, as the boys’ obsession with each other grows stronger, so do the monsters.
Now, there are various ways you can view these monsters; as real monsters one or both of the boys possess the power to create, as a manifestation of the trauma they try to keep buried inside of them or as their subconscious refusing to hide the things they have done. Or, you can read it as all three. At times, there was something Sucker Punch-esque about the story of Don’t Let The Forest In and despite the ‘big reveal’ ending, I think it’s still pretty ambiguous exactly what those monsters were.
My own reading of Don’t Let The Forest In, had me feeling horrifically claustrophobic and giggling and kicking my feet at the same time. While the whole world is obsessed with the enemies-to-lovers trope, the friends-to-romantic partners trope is being grossly underappreciated. The body horror in Don’t Let The Forest In isn’t just used to make you uncomfortable but also to help you understand Andrew’s consuming need to be close to Thomas - close, as in, inside his skin. This is especially powerful when you (and Andrew himself) realise that he is asexual.
Asexuality is a spectrum like any other but it’s a common misconception that asexual people are completely touch-averse. On the contrary, Andrew wants so desperately to entwine his being with Thomas, he just doesn’t want to have sex with him. Drews’s descriptions beautifully portray the intimacy you can have with someone without removing any clothes or even moving at all. Not only will these two boys quite literally die for each other but their passions as a writer and an artist respectively give them a way to connect and be vulnerable without any words being spoken.
Andrew and Thomas both enjoy twisted macabre fairy tales filled with monsters and they not only feel safe enough to share this with each other but to pull out these parts of each other even further. This twisted macabre fairy tale is one I am grateful CG Drews shared with us and I’m sure I will return to it time and time again until it’s earned its place as a gothic-horror romance classic.
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